Place

Am I writing this post because I feel motivated or does writing this post motivate me?

I’m not missing the MA course as such since it finished but I am missing something — I feel somewhat directionless. Perhaps it’s because deadlines are now self-imposed — whether I finish the thing today or tomorrow doesn’t really matter — leading to a certain fatigue of the brain and inability to act?

The thought of writing (and indeed of reading as research) seems too much effort contemplated in abstraction, but once embarked upon I seem unable to stop. Perhaps this is a clue; that thinking is best replaced with doing with the self-discipline to write regularly, spurring myself away from obfuscation towards more positive results???

I’m aware of the echo of past tutorial voices — ‘be discerning; only write down what it’s essential to say’ — but such instructions refer to another time and place. Perhaps now is the time to supplant them with the determination to write in a way that’s useful to me and which helps truly shape my practice?

Those bored by my ramblings may wish to avoid this blog in future.

The ‘Installations that never were…’ (http://clairemanning.co.uk/z_installations_that_ne…) project has ground to a halt, perhaps because all attempts to shift it from virtual image to physical, real, scaffolded installation have failed, denuding it of charge for me. Alternatively, perhaps it represents an evolutionary dead end for my practice, either just now or perhaps permanently?

Forum Arts National Sculpture Symposium (http://forumarts.org.uk/talks/national_sculpture_s… ) is an interesting opportunity that might test this problem, necessitating making something that responds to site, allowing me to the experience to work with real scaffolding for the first time. It’d enable me to verify if what results is a sculptural object in its own right, is merely collage support mechanism, or is an alternative form of collage I haven’t tried before.

My strategy is to re-photograph my first maquette – a very angular, abrupt structure — with no collage on it. I’ve also made a second maquette to test a more regimented structure. Originally envisaged as a regular cube, it evolved into the collapsing cube pictured above as I allowed the materials and structure to speak to me in the now of making. For test purposes, I’ve photographed it both with and without collaged elements on it.

All photographs have been ‘green-screened’, leaving the object floating in an empty background ready to be dropped into any environment I choose. I’ll visit site this week to photograph suitable vistas to ‘install’ the maquettes in, which may well lead to more maquettes.

My final proposal for the symposium will be inspired by nature, either working with or against it as a harsh adjunct. What I suggest may involve bisecting a view to break it up to interrupt and frame the sections I desire — a view that shifts as the viewer alters position. My concerns may well remain with collage but perhaps through a subtle route; a virtual image hidden behind a QR code, only visible to those with the technology, time, and desire to activate the code? This would allow me to blend virtual and real; the real of the sculpture with the virtual fantasy of a QR image that never truly existed.

Time flies and making stops when project planning an exhibition!

Where has the time gone?

I realise any attempts to make art work recently has pretty much ground to a halt. Peaks and troughs are inevitable but this one links primarily to the fact I’m project managing an exhibition in June for Making Art Work (http://makingart-work.co.uk/on-tap-a-site-responsi…) and my rather obsessional nature compels me to complete preparation and planning as early as possible.

I usually handle website stuff so perhaps volunteering to project manage wasn’t the most sensible move. It’s been a baptism of fire – attempting to answer questions raised by others on marketing matters and producing a project plan myself when I’ve only limited experience of either — but I have learnt a lot, quickly, and it’ll be invaluable for my own practice in the longer term.

I also volunteered to produce the graphics for the show, somewhat silly in terms of its impact on my schedule but a useful new skill. Luckily I’d already taken shots of the venue on a site visit so I used this as the foundation for the design. The overall concept was easy to come up with but I discovered it needed loads of tweaking – obsessional changes and shifting around – to deliver an end result (above right) that I hope you agree looks polished rather than amateurish. I also realise it’s best to source a print supplier early on as each works to slightly different requirements and it saves time working within these when mocking up the final design.

Hopefully, with planning pretty much in place, the next month will be a bit less demanding and I can return to some making before the final all-encompassing push of getting the final show ready!

Has this been a good or a bad week — I can’t decide? I know I’ve been obsessed with film-making since my initial foray into the medium, transmuting collage number two into another film (https://vimeo.com/90254922).

I’ve experimented with the final finish — frame length and whether to animate or not — settling finally (for now!) on a simple, paired-down approach that focuses attention on pure looking. Seduced by their ethos and great layout, Vimeo is where both films are now hosted.

The second film was much harder to make than the first. I tried using far more images at a rapid frame rate but the result was too busy and not consistent quality-wise so I’ve stuck with the less-is-more approach.

An attempt to shift To slice n.02 to a filmic state failed, possibly because it has insufficient texture and layering for the photographic interplay of focus and blurring to work.

I must trust my instincts. As with any making process, when it works I seem to shift into an ‘other’ almost transcendental personal state. Forcing making under any other conditions is a warning to STOP!

I film exciting. It’s a fresh way to offer a physical collaged object to a viewer, one insisting upon careful and specific engagement if the spectator agrees to look at all. It sends the work out into the ether with minimum intervention – quick, no need for complex installation – both practical and liberating. But I acknowledge I’m still too close to the initial making process to judge true critical merit. Is the work stronger or weaker than a physically collaged offering, or is it simply different?

New opportunities — the ones that aren’t part of my usual way of working but I find myself instinctively drawn to — can be a fantastic way to develop ones practice. The collage abuse series came about in this way, and another opportunity this week resulted in me transmuting one collage into a series of filmic stills. This flirt with film is definitely a first for me. It’s an approach which fractures viewing into small slices that gradually reveal a whole, an exercise both in giving and in withholding.

Sabine Kriebel voiced the opinion photographs are a witness to aging, capturing a moment that’s always past and anticipating the body’s passing.(1) The stillness of photography promotes the notion of death whereas film returns the dead to an appearance of life.(1) Given this, what does my approach deliver? Perhaps it creates a kind of half-life, incapable of animating the dead image in any way but able to animate and capture my viewing perspective as the artist and communicate it more readily and immediately to a willing spectator?

For me, the approach is yet another form of collage; something born out of disparate fragments recombined to make something new. However, to some extent, it’s a much more controlling mechanism that the original collage. I can’t control how someone looks at a picture on a wall, but a filmic approach fixes frame, order, and duration. Yes, the viewer may choose not to look at all, but if they do, they are subject to what I dictate.

I worked with a single collage, To accrete no5, and found spending time shooting it resulted in it giving up its most interesting angles, textures, tones, colour, and compositions. The experience felt like composing and painting through the mechanism of the camera.

I’m aware that the approach extends the shift of the raw materials across mediums — original photograph — to scanned digital information — to collaged physical object — back to photograph — finally ending in filmic stills. Obviously, there is no reason for the dislocation to stop here — it could continue endlessly.

My intention was to work with some logic — a flow of composition around the picture plane — but to pan in and out on different shots emphasising details and dislocating the viewing perspective from one still to another. I discovered lighting this multi-layered collage from above and to one side delivered far more dramatic results than the more traditional, even, illumination from both sides. The shots have been deliberately tweaked in Photoshop to emphasise drama and bring out extremes of contrast and focus.

This is my first foray into Windows Movie Maker. I found it pretty user friendly with nifty functions to animate the slide like crossfade and zoom. These allowed me to increase disjuncture, resulting in something with a constant gentle drift to the viewer’s left.

My goal is to create a fractured viewing experience that encourages careful looking and is more thought-provoking than simply encountering the still shot that reveals everything at one glance. I’d like it to begin by hinting at what’s on offer, revealing ‘truth’ only towards the end of the experience.

Let the audience judge if this is successful:

https://vimeo.com/89775077

http://clairemanning.co.uk/z_collage_abuse.html

1 Sabine Kriebel, ‘Theories of Photography; a short history’, in James Elkins, Photographic Theory, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p.34.